According to Dykstra, ex-Met teammate Ron Darling and Mets owners Fred and Jeff Wilpon helped Darling fake thyroid cancer, and ex-Phillies teammate Dale Murphy has a “loser son” who took a rubber bullet in the eye during a peaceful protest about the George Floyd atrocity.

Nobody likes a sore loser. Lenny Dykstra seems determined, alas, to make the sorest of losers before him resemble Medal of Honour winners.

Maybe it was wishful thinking to expect Dykstra to go gently into that good, gray night after his defamation suit against his 1986 Mets teammate Ron Darling was thrown out by the New York State Supreme Court last week. He seems bent on going there scorched earth and half blind.

How else would you describe a man legally declared libel and defamation proof who declares Darling faked thyroid cancer (for which he underwent surgery last year), Mets owner Fred Wilpon and Wilpon’s son Jeff (their chief operating officer) were in on the fakery, and New York State Supreme Court justice Robert D. Kalish was bought and paid for to rule against his defamation suit toward Darling’s memoir 108 Stitches?

Kalish ruled, in essence, that Dykstra couldn’t be defamed as claimed by Darling’s memoir 108 Stitches considering the former outfielder’s past, to which he copped only too bluntly in his own memoir (House of Nails), having committed “fraud, embezzlement, grand theft, and lewd conduct and assault with a deadly weapon.”

On Tuesday NJ.com writer Randy Miller published the net result of telephone conversations with Dykstra in the wake of the lawsuit dismissal. “Hearing and watching Lenny Dykstra rant and curse and slur his words during selfie Twitter videos is what it’s like talking to the former Mets and Phillies star over the phone.”

“Ron Darling lied about cancer, OK?” Dykstra tweeted with video Monday, after his Uber ride in southern California got “rammed into by a couple of hillbillies.” Knowing Dykstra’s penchant for describing people dissimilar to himself in racial and other slur terms, it’s not unreasonable to guess that “a couple of hillbillies” to him were just people in a pickup truck regardless of whence they hail.

Darling took a leave of absence from his job as a Mets broadcaster (on a team with Gary Cohen and with his former 86 Mets teammate Keith Hernandez) recuperating from his surgery. It would require copious dollars paid to a lot of people to enable a hoax like that, but Dykstra swore to Miller that he has “documents” to prove it. Documents not yet proffered.

“I got the proof. The Wilpons knew all about it, and they’re in on it,” Dykstra told Miller. “Never in a million [fornicating] years did they think Nails would get to the [fornicating]  bottom of this, but I [fornicating]-eh did . . . I’m going to prove it when I do in an interview with an AP writer and expose them because I got documented proof. That means I can support what I say.”

He didn’t offer to share the documented proof with Miller. But while he was at it, Dykstra tweeted aloud that he thinks Darling and the Wilpons might have been behind the couple of hillbillies who rammed his Uber ride. Might.

Darling mis-remembered Dykstra hurling racial slurs toward Boston Red Sox pitcher Oil Can Boyd before leading off and homering against Boyd to open Game Three of the 1986 World Series. The worst the Mets’ bench jockeys hammered Boyd with, other than hollering, “C’mon, throw harder than that, you pussy,” was a schoolyard play on his nickname, “Shit Can,” after a former teammate advised them Boyd could be rattled by bench jockeying.

But Kalish cited enough existing further evidence of subsequent racial slurs, not to mention the sad revelations Darling cited and hammered that emanated from Dykstra’s spectacular enough business collapse, to determine Dykstra libel and defamation proof legally. Among numerous other sources, Kalish cited Dykstra’s own memoir.

It’s a terrible thing to ponder that a baseball player as admired as Dykstra was (and remains) for playing hard-nosed with occasional bull-headedness (fair disclosure: I was one of those admirers) collapsed under the weight of his own flaws to the point where his reputation couldn’t save him. Not every player finds life after baseball without potholes, pitfalls, or pratfalls. Dykstra’s happened to be deeper, wider, and more profound than many.

Tweeting and beating his gums as he has in the wake of the Kalish ruling won’t help Dykstra and may injure him further. “[I]t has been determined, as a matter of law, that Dykstra’s reputation is so utterly sullied that he is unable to be defamed,” observed NBC Sports’s Craig Calcaterra. “The same, however, would certainly not be found if Ron Darling, the Wilpons, the judge who dismissed Darling’s case, and/or Dale Murphy’s son wanted to sue him.”

Dale Murphy’s son?

Dykstra and Murphy were Phillies teammates briefly, during the sadder part of Murphy’s injury-abetted decline phase. Last Saturday evening, Murphy’s son took part in one of the more peaceful protests, in Denver, against George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police—and took a rubber bullet right next to his left eye.

An Atlanta Braves icon, whose reputation as a clean player and a clean man has never been challenged credibly, Murphy revealed his son’s injury on Twitter last Sunday night. “His story is not unique,” Murphy said in the tweet, which preceded another showing his son’s injury. “Countless others have also experienced this use of excessive police force while trying to have their voices heard.”

On Monday morning, Dykstra tweeted of his former teammate, “F*** him and his loser kid.” That afternoon, Dykstra went further: “No children of Lenny Dykstra have had issues with police resulting from being part of an Antifa mob. We Dykstras have proper respect for the men in blue.”

You don’t have to be part of an Antifa mob to know and believe that four Minneapolis police officers—particularly Derek Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck, now facing charges upgraded from third-degree to second-degree murder, and his three partners now charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter—committed an atrocity that no decent human being would or should dismiss.

You don’t have to disrespect the men in blue to understand that rogue cops exist, commit crimes in their own right, commit atrocities for reasons racial and otherwise, and escape accountability through ways and means such as “qualified immunity.” And, that ordinary citizens have every right in these United States and on God’s green earth to object to and protest those crimes and atrocities.

You also don’t have to be either a craven, wingnut left or right agitator to understand that there have been only too many among us who seized upon the Floyd atrocity and the culpability of four Minneapolis police officers as an excuse to break entire neighbourhoods, if not cities, and the lives of those whose neighbourhoods they broke, regardless that the  targets had nothing to do with committing that atrocity.

So them Dykstras have proper respect for the men in blue? This grandson (paternal) of a New York police officer (he retired the year I was born) would like to remind them that the crooked and corrupt among the men in blue stain their fellow officers profoundly enough. Grandpa Walter—one of the gentlest but firmest souls you’d ever wish to meet off duty—would have denounced such rogue cops and such free-lance looters and vandals with equal fury.

“[F]rom where I’m sitting,” Calcaterra writes, “[Darling, the Wilpons, Kalish, and the Murphys would] each have very good cases if they decided to go that route” of their own litigation against Dykstra’s remarks. From where I’m sitting, Calcaterra probably isn’t sitting alone.

Lenny Dykstra (with Keith Hernandez, left) and Ron Darling (right, with Dwight Gooden), seen at a distance, joined other 1986 Mets for Shea Stadium’s closing over a decade ago. Dykstra’s defamation suit against Darling for remarks in a memoir has been thrown out by a New York State Supreme Court justice who ruled that Dykstra’s reputation preceded him only too well.

Can your reputation go so far beneath even the most grimy sewer that you can’t be libeled or defamed? Asked and answered by a New York State Supreme Court justice last Friday, while throwing Lenny Dykstra’s suit against his 1986 Mets teammate Ron Darling out of court.

Essentially, Justice Robert D. Kalish ruled, in Dykstra v.St. Martin’s Press LL.C., Macmillan Publishing Group, LL.C, Ronald Darling, and Daniel Paisner, that calling Dykstra a misogynistic racist predator thief and embezzler means only that you’ve read Dykstra’s autobiography.

Last year, Darling published 108 Stitches: Loose Threads, Ripping Yarns, and the Darndest Characters from My Time in the Game. (Paisner was his ghostwriter.) Among other things, Darling wrote that, when the Mets squared off against Dennis (Oil Can) Boyd in Fenway Park during Game Three of the 1986 World Series, Dykstra—the Mets’ leadoff hitter in the game—hammered Boyd with a round of racial epithets even before facing the slim righthander.

Boyd himself had no memory of Dykstra’s verbal abuse. Neither did two African-American Mets stars, Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden. Darling swore the abuse happened and lamented aloud that he hadn’t taken a stronger stand against it at the time. Dykstra was not amused to see it in print, denying every syllable of it, and sued Darling, his ghost, and his publisher and its parent.

This was what Dykstra thought especially would prove the money quote with no value except putting mucho millions into his bank account once he got through with Darling in court:

In Game 3 of the 1986 World Series, though, Oil Can was on the receiving end of the ugliest piece of vitriol I’ve ever heard –in a bar, on a baseball diamond … anywhere. It was right up there with one of the worst, most shameful moments I ever experienced in the game, and one of the great shames of the exchange was that I sat there with my teammates and didn’t do a damn thing about it. In fact, it resulted in a momentum shift that probably turned the Series around for us, and like most of the other guys on the bench, I stood and cheered at the positive outcome . . .

. . . The hero of Game 3 for us was also the asshole of the game –Lenny Dykstra, one of baseball’s all-time thugs. You know how there always seems to be a guy in every organization, in every walk of life, who gets away with murder –murder being a figurative term in this case? That was Lenny. He was a criminal in every sense, although during his playing days his crimes were mostly of an interpersonal nature. He treated people like shit, walked around like his shit didn’t stink and was generally a shitty human being –and, just maybe, the most confident, cocky player I would ever encounter. It was after he left the game, though, that his behavior took a truly criminal turn; he ended up being sentenced to house arrest on a bankruptcy fraud indictment, and he was also up on drug possession and grand-theft-auto charges, for which he received a three-year prison sentence. Not exactly the poster boy for America’s game, huh?

Oil Can Boyd, on the mound at Fenway Park.

“Based on the papers submitted on this motion, prior to the publication of the book, Dykstra was infamous for being, among other things, racist, misogynist, and anti-gay, as well as a sexual predator, a drug-abuser, a thief, and an embezzler,” Kalish wrote in his opinion.

Further, Dykstra had a reputation—largely due to his autobiography—of being willing to do anything to benefit himself and his team, including using steroids and blackmailing umpires . . . Considering this information, which was presumably known to the average reader of the book, this Court finds that, as a matter of law, the reference in the book has not exposed Dykstra to any further “public contempt, ridicule, aversion or disgrace,” or “evil opinion of him in the minds of right-thinking persons,” or “deprivation of friendly intercourse in society.

The nature and seriousness of Dykstra’s criminal offenses, which include fraud, embezzlement, grand theft, and lewd conduct and assault with a deadly weapon, and notably the degree of publicity they received, have already established his general bad reputation for fairness and decency far worse than the alleged racially charged bench-jockeying in the reference could . . .

. . . Given the aforesaid litany of stories concerning Dykstra’s poor and mean-spirited behavior particularly toward various groups including racial minorities, women, and the LGBTQ community—this Court finds that, as a matter of law, the reference cannot “induce an evil opinion of [Dykstra] in the minds of right-thinking persons” or “deprive him of their friendly intercourse in society,” as that “evil opinion” has long existed.

Now a Mets broadcaster working next to another ’86 Mets teammate, Keith Hernandez, Darling has no illusions about that notorious bunch. With a small group of exceptions, including Hall of Famer Gary Carter, the ’86 Mets were baseball’s Hell’s Angels without the motorcycles. They made the 1934-35 Cardinals’ Gas House Gang resemble a group of lawn bowlers.

“This team was arrogant, always believed it would win it all, never mind what it said on the scoreboard or in the box score,” Darling wrote in 108 Stitches. “Still and all, [Game Three] was a must-win for the good guys, only we didn’t exactly come across as good guys on this.” Having fewer illusions about Dykstra, whose reputation went from merely dubious to downright grotesque after the century turned, doesn’t exactly make Darling  an outlier.

With the Mets down to the Red Sox two games to none as the series shifted to Fenway, Dykstra opened Game Three by hitting the righthanded Boyd’s hanging slider on 1-1 over the right field fence. With two on to follow at once, Carter doubled them home, and two outs later Danny Heep singled Hernandez home, and just like that the Mets had a 4-0 lead.

They tacked on two more in the seventh (a two-run single by Carter) and one in the eighth (eventual Series MVP Ray Knight doubling Strawberry home), and the only thing the Red Sox had in reply against Mets starting lefthander Bob Ojeda that night was Marty Barrett singling Dave Henderson home in the third.

To this day Boyd denies he was rattled when he threw Dykstra the home run pitch. “I’m kind of disturbed about [the allegations of racial epithets],” he told a radio interviewer last year. “I’m also kind of hurt about it because I have been around Lenny and I played ball with Lenny in Japan, and he didn’t seem to come off as that type of a person . . . The person I saw, I liked. The person that I talked to, I liked. So I’m quite disturbed about it.”

The worst anyone ever said about Darling in his pitching days was his Mets manager Davey Johnson complaining that Darling—a Yale graduate with a dual degree in French and Southeast Asian history—“was just so goddamned intellectual, he thought he could figure everything out himself.” Darling, who tried to live on the corners until it cut down the sharp movements of his pitches, admitted he wanted to pitch as well as Gooden but “didn’t have his gifts, so I thought way too much.”

Not even his worst enemies thought Darling was reckless at minimum. Not even when he overthought himself into so many high pitch-count games that Johnson was compelled to go to his bullpen more frequently than he desired. Calling Dykstra reckless was the second-biggest understatement in 1980s-1990s baseball.

Darling moved in court to dismiss the Dykstra lawsuit. Citing a 1987 precedent in another publishing case, Kalish ruled that Dykstra had no standing against the doctrine of the libel-proof plaintiff  that “bars relief in a defamation action,as a matter of law to a plaintiff whose ‘reputation with respect to a specific subject may be so badly tarnished that he cannot be further injured by allegedly false statements on that subject’.”

All the court had to do was decide whether Dykstra could claim libel or defamation, and he “must have had a reputation capable of further injury when the reference was published. This Court finds that Dykstra lacked such a reputation at the time of publication.” That may have been a far too polite way to phrase it.